Social media is an interactive forum, where the site owner and site visitor together create the content of the medium. Employing social media can help you to cross promote products or events, to source new clients and to redirect traffic to more informative sources, such as your website.
Twitter is an ideal platform to talk to your customers and industry peers, providing a medium for discussion and idea generation. It is important to provide your followers with interesting information and facts; simply publicising products or services is unlikely to encourage readers click through to your website.
Vermeer Underground has an informative and interactive twitter page that creates a sense of community while also informing readers.
The company’s recent tweets include:
- “Questions on how to assemble your Armor Drilling System? Check out this quick tutorial here…”
- “As we near the end of the year, it’s time to start to look back. What’s the toughest job you completed this year?…
The key to tweeting is to engage your followers: ask questions, respond to posts, and provide information that will be useful.
YouTube
YouTube can be used as a powerful tool in the trenchless industry. For contractors trying to explain how a technique works to novices in the industry, technical terms can overwhelm the listener. Providing an illustrative video can show a potential client how the process works.
Interflow’s video on the company’s largest spiral wound pipe renewal is a prime example of how effective a YouTube video can be for educating the water industry on how processes work.
Coliban Water also realises the power of an illustrative video, and have released a video on pipe bursting on the company’s YouTube channel.
Pinterest is a relatively new site on the social media scene, and is a means of sharing pictures with your audience. Ditch Witch has recently released a Pinterest page with an array of interesting pictures. Pinterest has a lot of potential for the trenchless industry, as it is a visual medium that allows complicated ideas to be explained with a picture. A good image can “÷go viral’ and be shared by hundreds, or even thousands of Pinterest users.